In spiritual direction, we move slowly, listening beneath the surface, noticing what stirs, trusting that God is already at work in the places that feel most tender or tangled.
Continue reading “Living in the Truth”Living in the Truth
Author: Smitten With Goodness
The Grace of Remembering
One of the most honest truths about the spiritual life is this: we forget.
Not because we are ungrateful, but because the human heart is easily scattered. We drift from the One who sustains us, not out of rebellion, but out of distraction. And yet, across the ages, God’s gentle refrain remains the same: Remember.
Healed, Whole, and Holy
Through Christ, we are already healed. Already whole and holy. Not someday. Not when we finally get our lives in order. Not when we feel worthy. This is the quiet miracle of grace: Christ’s healing reaches us before we even know how to ask for it.
Continue reading “Healed, Whole, and Holy”Are We Asking the Right Question?
So much of our world right now is filled with anxious questions around technology, especially around AI. The fear is understandable. New things unsettle us. They expose how little control we actually have.
I work around some crazy smart computer scientists and engineers. One of which is Luay Nakhleh, Dean, George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing, Rice University. He has me thinking that there is a deeper invitation beyond if AI is good or bad. There is a more honest and more revealing question: What am I doing with this thing and what is it doing to me?
Continue reading “Are We Asking the Right Question?”Freedom That Lives Beyond Borders
On this 250th anniversary of Independence Day in the United States, we give thanks for the gifts of civic freedom, voices that can speak, communities that can gather, people who can shape their common life. Yet as Christians, we know that the deepest freedom does not come from any nation, constitution, or historical moment. True freedom lives beyond the boundaries of a country. It is the freedom God offers to every human heart, in every land, in every age.
Continue reading “Freedom That Lives Beyond Borders”The Deep End of Life
Resiliency is not the hardening of the heart but the deepening of it. It is the quiet courage to move through our pain rather than trying to go around it. The only way out of suffering is through it—through the questions, through the ache, through the places where we feel stretched beyond what we can bear. And yet, as we walk this path, something in us expands. We become more spacious, more grounded, more able to live in hope.
Continue reading “The Deep End of Life”The Tightrope of Hope
There comes a moment in the second half of life when the pace finally slows enough for us to notice what may have always been there. A quiet and subtle tightrope stretched across the landscape of our inner world. I think I ran too fast in the first half of my life to see it. But now, with more years behind me than ahead, I can feel that subtle sway especially between the movement between hope and hopelessness.
Continue reading “The Tightrope of Hope”God Big Enough for Everyone
Sometimes I think we forget just how expansive God’s dream for the world really is. We shrink it down to the size of our comfort, our circles, our assumptions. But the God revealed in Jesus keeps breaking those boundaries open. His vision is so big, so generous, so overflowing with love that everyone is invited in.
Continue reading “God Big Enough for Everyone”The Love That Holds Us
Some mornings a single line from a saint feels like it reaches out and taps you on the shoulder. Recently it was St. Isidore of Seville: “Reading the Holy Scriptures confers two benefits. It trains the mind to understand them; it turns man’s attention from the follies of the world and leads him to the love of God.” There is something steadying in that reminder. Scripture doesn’t simply inform us—it forms us, shaping both our thinking and our seeing.
Continue reading “The Love That Holds Us”No Other God
There is a quiet power in the simple declaration: there is no other God. Not a threat, not a competition, just a truth that steadies the heart. There is no other source of the love that made you. No other well that can satisfy your thirst. No other presence that knows you so completely and still calls you beloved.
Continue reading “No Other God”
